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The Aga: Cooks' favourite cooking contraption

By Denise BalkissoonSpecial to the Star

Fri., Nov. 26, 2010

Susan Gitajn was scared. Her new house had a weird half-ton of curvaceously boxy cast iron in the kitchen.

An eager but amateur cook, Gitajn had never seen an Aga before she walked into that kitchen in 2000. British expats (and readers of a certain kind of English novel) know and love the contraption as a fixture in drafty country houses, an always-on, always-warm cooking machine, celebrated for unmatched prowess in slow-cooking, simmering and baking.

When Susan Gitajn's house came with an Aga stove, she wanted to ditch it. Now she loves it so much she renovated her kitchen around it. (TANNIS TOOHEY / TORONTO STAR)

Jonathan Dimitriu demonstrates how bread is baked in his Aga stove at his Woodbridge home. (ANDREW WALLACE / TORONTO STAR)

But for Gitajn, her new Danforth kitchen was a strange place. “I really didn't know what to do with it,” she admits.

She asked the former owners if they wouldn't rather take their odd stove with them. They wanted to, but were moving into a small apartment. Really, they reassured her, you'll love it.

“The biggest challenge was that it had no knobs,” Gitajn recalls.

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Aga aficionados trust that the ever-ready ovens and warming plates hover steadily at designated temperatures, from about 160F for the warming oven to 800F for the stovetop boiling plate.

Gitajn, daunted, kept sticking a thermometer inside her blue cooker to be sure. It was stressful. Finally, she called Bellevie, then the only Toronto Aga outlet, for help.

“A sales person showed up with food, and pans, and spent hours showing me how to use it,” she says. She learned how to start food on the top boiling plate, then move it into ovens of varying temperatures. The results were sublime. Made entirely of cast iron, the Aga literally radiates heat. She found that food could be left unattended for ages, and would always be moist, never dry. Slow-cooking was a strong point: Soon she was making supremely tender roasts, complex reductions, mouth-watering stews.

Multicourse dinner parties were no problem. Gitajn could stuff four or five pans into each 1.5 cubic-foot oven, and the cooker could handle turkeys of up to 28 pounds.

It wasn't long before Gitajn was as devoted to the Aga as its illustrious fans — Jamie Oliver, Sting and Prince Charles, to name but three. By the time she renovated her kitchen in 2007, she was so attached to her Aga that she designed the new room around it. The contractors had to reinforce the floor before a specialist dismantled it, moved it, then reassembled it.

Gitjan is sold: “It's the main reason I'll never move. It is beautiful.”

For those unfamiliar with the Aga, it's the grandfather of high-end ovens. A two-oven version starts at around $15,000; a four-oven cooker attached to a gas range can reach $40,000.

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Despite its popularity in the U.K., the inventor was Swedish, the Nobel-winning physicist Gustaf Dalén. He was blind but wanted to help his wife with domestic chores. In 1929, he had the idea of placing two ovens and two hotplates around a permanent heat source. Because the four roasting, baking, simmering and warming ovens are always in the same place, and always hot, Dalén could cook without burning himself.

Aga's are easier to learn to use today than when Gitajn moved into her home. For the past five years, the AGA Shop at 150-154 King St. E, at Jarvis, has shared a high-ceilinged showroom in an 1833 Georgian building with Grange, a French furniture purveyor with a pedigree as impressive as the cooker's. The space is the venue for regular cooking demonstrations, where sales manager Daniel Frohlich shows off the Aga's prowess. Culinary themes might be Italian trattoria, or a day's worth of meals. Each ends in a tasting session, so converts and wannabes can enjoy the Aga's succulent output.

Andrew Combes and his wife, Nicola, are English expats and Aga loyalists. Their grandmothers had Agas, they had one in their hometown of Sussex, and they ordered a forest-green one when they lived in Vermont. In 2004, they built a house in Georgian Bay with a bright red four-oven cooker. The architect had to reinforce the kitchen floor. The stove weighs 584 kilos.

Like most Aga fans, Nicola finds the Aga oven handy for big batches. “I just cooked up a whole load of beef stew and chicken stew,” she says of the meals she makes for two elderly neighbours. “For me it's so easy. I just make a huge pot and shove it in the Aga and leave it overnight.”

For Andrew, there are sweeter benefits. “My wife is known as the dessert queen,” he says, waxing poetic about her meringues and pies.

Though stainless steel and induction cooktops are big trends today, Aga still has enormous appeal. Recent cooking-school grad Jonathan Dimitriu had his Woodbridge kitchen designed around a four-oven Aga.

“It's so striking to look at,” says the aspiring chef. His is a rich eggplant colour (or, as the Brits call it, aubergine). Dimitriu's learning curve wasn't too steep. For his first Aga meal, in August 2009, he chose a classic, coq au vin. It was a hit. The chicken was moist, the red wine sauce complex. “The simmering oven gives you the perfect temperature for all things braised,” Dimitriu says.

The Aga has one major drawback, but even it makes for funny anecdotes. Propane Agas have an external vent, which helps keep flavours from intermingling. But this eliminates aromas that otherwise warn the multi-tasking chefs that the food is read. Morphing a meal into carbon is an Aga rite of passage.

“They were black, charred things,” says Steven DeNure of the three loaves of bread he forgot during a Halloween potluck at his farmhouse near Lindsay. “I put them on the table anyway, as a gag Halloween table decoration.”

Aga owners around the world bond online, too. “What other cooker has email discuss groups dedicated to it?” asks Toronto's Janet Ballantyne, who has chatted with international Aga heads on two Yahoo discussion groups, Posh Nosh and AGA Lovers. Conversations range from general cooking tips to emergency power supplies.

Because it takes eight hours to heat up, turning the Aga off isn't really an option. In these energy-conscious times, the cooker that never sleeps has drawn environmental criticism, especially older models fuelled by coal or oil.

Fans counter that it's made of 70-per-cent recycled materials and will last a lifetime. Last year, The Telegraph found a working Aga that had been running since 1932.

In any case, the heat is beloved by Aga owners in cold climates.

“Some articles of clothing, I just take them out of the washing machine and lay them on the Aga,” Gitajn says. “No ironing needed.”

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